Critique
Academics such asThere is nothing wrong with explaining facts that are already known: no one faults a physicist for explaining why stars shine or apples fall toward earth. But evolutionary psychology would not be very useful if it were only capable of providing explanations after the fact, because almost nothing about the mind is known or understood: there are few facts, at the moment, to be explained! The strength of an evolutionary approach is that it can aid discovery: it allows you to generate predictions about what programs the mind might contain, so that you can conduct experiments to see if they in fact exist..... at about evolutionary explanations of phenomena that are already known? Those who have a professional knowledge of evolutionary biology know that it is not possible to cook up after the fact explanations of just any trait. There are important constraints on evolutionary explanation. More to the point, every decent evolutionary explanation has testable predictions about the design of the trait. For example, the hypothesis that pregnancy sickness is a byproduct of prenatal hormones predicts different patterns of food aversions than the hypothesis that it is an adaptation that evolved to protect the fetus from pathogens and plant toxins in food at the point in embryogenesis when the fetus is most vulnerable – during the first trimester. Evolutionary hypotheses – whether generated to discover a new trait or to explain one that is already known – carry predictions about the design of that trait. The alternative – having no hypothesis about adaptive function – carries no predictions whatsoever. So which is the more constrained and sober scientific approach?Al-Shawaf et al. argue that many evolutionary psychology hypothesis are formed in a "top-down" approach; a theory is used to generate a hypothesis and predictions are then made from this hypothesis. This method makes it generally impossible to engage in just-so storytelling because the hypothesis and predictions are made ''a priori'', based on the theory. By contrast, the "bottom-up" approach, whereby an observation is made and a hypothesis is generated to explain the observation, could potentially be a form of just-so storytelling if no novel predictions were developed from the hypothesis. Provided novel, testable predictions are made from the hypothesis, then it cannot be argued that the hypothesis is a just-so story. Al-Shawaf et al. argue that the just-so accusation is a result of the fact that, like other evolutionary sciences, evolutionary psychology is partially a historical discipline. However, the authors argue that if this made evolutionary psychology nothing but just-so storytelling, then other partially historical scientific disciplines such as astrophysics, geology or cosmology would also be just-so storytelling. What makes any scientific discipline, not just partially historical ones, valid is their ability to make testable novel predictions in the present day. Evolutionary psychologists do not need to travel back in time to test their hypotheses, as their hypotheses yield predictions about what we would expect to see in the modern world. Lisa DeBruine argues that evolutionary psychology can generate testable, novel predictions. She gives an example of evolved navigation theory, which hypothesised that people would overestimate vertical distances relative to horizontal ones and that vertical distances are overestimated more from the top than from the bottom, due to the risks of falling from a greater height leading to a greater chance of injury or death encouraging people to be more cautious when assessing the risks of vertical distances. The predictions of the theory were confirmed and the facts were previously unknown until evolved navigation theory tested them, demonstrating that evolutionary psychology can make novel predictions of previously unknown facts. Berry et al. argue that critics of adaptationist "just so stories" are often guilty of creating "just not so stories", uncritically accepting any alternative explanation provided it is not the adaptationist one. Furthermore, the authors argue that Gould's use of the term "adaptive function" is overly restrictive, as they insist it must refer to the original adaptive function the trait evolved for. According to the authors, this is a nonsensical requirement, because if an adaptation was then used for a new, different, adaptive function, then this makes the trait an adaptation because it remains in the population because it helps organisms with this new function. Thus the trait's original purpose is irrelevant because it has been co-opted for a new purpose and maintains itself within the species because it increases reproductive success of members of the species who have it (versus those who may have lost it for some reason); nature is blind to the original "intended" function of the trait. David Buss argued that while Gould's "just-so story" criticism is that the data that an evolutionary psychology adaptationist hypothesis explains could be equally explained by different hypotheses (such as exaptationist or co-opted spandrel hypotheses), Gould failed to meet the relevant evidentiary burdens with regards to these alternative hypotheses. According to Buss, co-opted exaptationist and spandrel hypotheses have an additional evidentiary burden compared to adaptationist hypotheses, as they must identify both the later co-opted functionality and the original adaptational functionality, while proposals that something is a co-opted byproduct must identify what the trait was a byproduct of and what caused it to be co-opted; it is not sufficient simply to propose an alternative exaptationist, functionless byproduct or spandrel hypotheses to the adaptationist one, rather these evidentiary burdens must be met. Buss argues that Gould's failure to do this meant that his assertion that apparent adaptations were actually exaptations was itself nothing more than a just-so story.Buss, David M., Martie G. Haselton, Todd K. Shackelford, April L. Bleske, and Jerome C. Wakefield. "Adaptations, exaptations, and spandrels." American psychologist 53, no. 5 (1998): 533, p.546
Alternatives in evolutionary developmental biology
'' How the Snake Lost Its Legs: Curious Tales from the Frontier of Evo-Devo'' is a 2014 book on evolutionary developmental biology by Lewis I. Held, Jr. The title is "A factual homage to Rudyard Kipling's fanciful ''Just So Stories''."See also
* Demarcation problem, philosophical question of distinguishing science and non-science * Factoid * False etymology, similar phenomenon in linguistics * '' Ipse dixit'' * Origin myth * Pourquoi story * Richard Lewontin, who accused neo-Darwinists of telling just-so stories *References
{{Reflist Figures of speech Pejorative terms Types of scientific fallacy Urban legends